Are media feeding copycat suicides?

The troubling report in today's Denver Post about a rash of teen suicides in Douglas County strangely says nothing about last week's huge national story on the Florida teenager who took his own life while an audience watched via live webcast. Here's the Nov. 26 Post story. The AP dispatch on Abraham Biggs' self-murder was carried by the Denver Post online and in print beginning Nov. 21.

Copycat suicides, like copycat school shootings, are a well-documented phenomenon of the sick times we live in. Science writer Malcolm Gladwell, for example, discusses the problem in detail in his 2002 best-seller, The Tipping Point.

The Post did not, to my knowledge, carry a still photo of the tragically deranged Biggs, nor did it link to video of him. But if you Google for "Abraham Biggs suicide video," you get more than 54,000 hits. Horrifying.

Some of those are from unedited wildcat websites of the sort that are now ubiquitous and getting more so. Restraint on the part of those new-media actors can only come from internalized moral scruples of decency. Good luck there.

But shouldn't the responsibly edited news outlets such as the cable and broadcast TV networks be expected to hold themselves to a higher standard?

Fox News Channel, for instance, claims some fidelity to traditional values, but when tabloid sensationalism is in the air, they don't seem to resist very well. They didn't on the Biggs story, from what I saw.

What Biggs did is indisputably "news," as are the technology that he used in doing it and the passively curious or in some cases actively macabre reactions of online witnesses. It had to be covered, and analyzed, up to a point.

But news organizations, in helping give the deceased his wish for global fame, have not only coarsened the moral tone of our times. They have also incentivized more such incidents, arguably abetting a number of deaths that need not have occurred.

Our word "obscene" comes from the ancient Greek ethos that recognized certain human emotions or actions as unworthy of portrayal to an audience -- hence confined to occurring off-scene and receiving no more than secondhand description on stage.

This was done in the interest of (1) preserving dignity for all concerned and (2) protecting onlookers from the very real danger of moral contagion. Those obscenity concerns are as valid in modern America as they were in ancient Athens.

Poor Abraham was diagnosed with severe mental illness, but I'll bet what he did was hastened by just such contagion from the culture. Other Abrahams are all around us right now, in Douglas County and everywhere else. You shudder to think what messages they are receiving from the celebrity he's been given. Obscenity rulings from our courts, or enactments from our lawmakers, are too much to hope for in this licentious age. Self-policing by those with the biggest megaphones, perhaps pushed by a revolted and fed-up public, is the best hope I can see.

Thanksgiving honors founders' faith

For anyone born in the last 50 years, "separation of church and state" is inculcated secular orthodoxy. I well remember the family discussion during which my dad informed me that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution, and I recall spending the next two hours searching my history books in futility to prove him wrong. That government is insulated from faith is a notion that survives only in historical ignorance. Perhaps nothing disproves this fallacy more effectively than Thanksgiving Day, an official government holiday established for the purpose of acknowledging God's blessing of America.

Abraham Lincoln instituted a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, proclaiming:

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

"But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

Lincoln deemed it "fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and once voice, by the whole American people."

Secularists, atheists and revisionists try to obscure these declarations of national faith, but Lincoln's sentiments echo those of our Founding Fathers.

The Continental Congress declared the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation on Nov. 1, 1777, so Americans could "express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join (in) the penitent confession of their manifold sins ... that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance."

When the "father of our country," George Washington, issued a similar decree in 1795, he declared it "our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we (have) experienced."

Despite our collective and individual shortcomings, Americans have prospered like no other people, but we are foolishly misguided if we believe that our freedom and longevity is the result of mere chance or that it can persevere without demanding sacrifice, humility and resolve from each of us.

Liberty, equality and freedom have certain biblical roots, and although our forefathers practiced divergent faiths and a few exhibited little faith at all, they were unified by an acknowledgement that only a faithful people is capable of self-governance.

In the 21st century, Americans continue to demonstrate a pervasive belief in God -- a faith that comforts and unifies us when tragedy and adversity remind us of our vulnerability.

Patrick Henry testified to Christianity's role in the birth of this nation and its capacity to co-exist with other faiths: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and free worship here."

Our ongoing struggles, though sometimes painful and heartbreaking, are not exceptional when compared to the suffering endured by those early colonists who dared to oppose the global superpower of that day.

On this Thanksgiving Day, we must remember the source of those patriots' strength and cultivate it for future generations.

The dangers of temporizing with passion

Temporize (verb): To act evasively in order to gain time, avoid argument, or postpone a decision. Washington Post, November 14: "The backlash against those who supported a ban on same-sex marriage continues to roil California and nearby states. Protests and vandalism of churches, boycotts of businesses and possibly related mailings of envelopes filled with white powder have followed the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriages."

Surely readers are familiar with many of the details of the lengthy Post article. The "gay" backlash against the popular will shows no signs of abating. For no matter how much we compromise with the homosexual lobby, it will not be satisfied with anything less than our full moral blessing.

We are in this mess today because we were willing to temporize with a passion that admits of no moderation. This error has its roots in the sexual revolution that hit with full force in the 1960s. The central idea was, "if it feels good, do it." The plain truth is that all manner of things which don’t feel good or are downright repulsive to most people, feel good to others.

Given society’s then generally heterosexual point of view, what felt good at first was the pleasure of sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex. However, those who accept the pleasure principle have no real quarrel with those who derive pleasure from members of the same sex. "Hey, man, if that’s your thing, go ahead."

The first victim of the sexual revolution, of course, was marriages, strained by men and women trying to "find themselves," or to regain the pleasure that somehow had gone out of their marriages. Accompanying but also enabling the sexual revolution was the invention of the birth control pill, which made it possible to avoid pregnancy, the primary argument against sex outside of marriage.

Just as the sexual revolution unhinged relations between the sexes, so did it change the practice of homosexuality. Previously the province of "intellectuals" in rebellion against the allegedly confining mores of bourgeois society, homosexuality became more popular and, hence, more vulgar. The broader public’s impression of that practice soon became dominated by news of bathhouse orgies and the spread of the HIV-AIDS virus.

Along the way, the personal became the political. If these liberated urges were to be freed from social or political limitations, their practitioners needed to organize and to importune friendly politicians to make speeches and pass laws on their behalf.

Governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown of California (1975-83) persuaded the legislature to remove laws against the practice of sodomy, one of those "blue laws" which were honored more in the breach than in the observance anyway.

When the AIDS crisis developed in the early 1980s, elite opinion was already poised to ignore the overwhelming evidence linking homosexuals’ reckless behavior to the disease and to maintain the fiction that it was as likely to spread by heterosexual contact as it was by homosexual means.

Having for all practical purposes put homosexuality on the same moral footing as love between the sexes, it was but a small step to the establishment of civil unions. Knowing that the vast majority of Americans understood marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, the advocates of "domestic partnerships" paused at a halfway house that was marriage in all but name.

I am convinced that civil unions were designed to prepare the public mind for what it could not accept back in 2000, when Californians voted overwhelmingly to preserve marriage, just as all of mankind had understood it for millennia. But then along came, first, the Massachusetts, then the California and Connecticut supreme courts, to decree that the "right" of same-sex marriage was entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Anything less would be unfair to this oppressed minority.

In short, the path to the present state in which angry mobs (and zealous lawyers) demand what no society in its right mind has any reason to grant, began with the intellectual and moral errors that characterized the sexual revolution. Nothing less than revisiting and rethinking those errors will suffice to avoid a chaotic future for us and our children.

He who says A must say B. If we have a right to do "whatever turns us on," there is no objection to same-sex marriage. If, on the other hand, same-sex marriage is wrong, its premise must be also.

The future of the Republican Party

(To the editors, WSJ, Nov. 17) The 11 letters to your newspaper today read like they were churned out of a Democratic talking points focus group. So, the Republican party will become a successful enterprise whenever it abandons its core principles? All this while "going back to its roots?" Anyone who thinks that abandoning the powerless unborn children and the endangered institution of marriage is somehow in line with Republicanism knows nothing about its true roots. Back in 1854, when the ruling Democratic Party committed itself to aiding and abetting the spread of slavery into Western territories and, in principle, to all states, old as well as new, North as well as South, the anti-slavery members of the Democrat and Whig parties coalesced into what soon became the Republican Party. If ever there was movement which appeared to be unlikely to succeed, this was it. A Democratic President, a Democratic Congress and, yes, a Democratic Supreme Court were poised to make slavery national.

Contrary to the naive theory of "progress" so alluring to many of our elites today, the Negroes' prospects for justice were worse, not better, than they were in 1776 or 1789. The reigning opinions and even the science of the day had decreed that blacks were inherently inferior and could never be accorded the same civil rights as whites. Leading Democrats like Sen. Stephen A. Douglas were amazed that Republicans would cause such a fuss for the sake of the rights of "a few miserable Negroes."

But Republicans in the beginning stuck to their guns and prevented the nation from acquiesing in the triumph of the slave power. Today's Republicans should be no less steadfast. As the Republican Party of 1856 declared its opposition to slavery and polygamy, those "twin relics of barbarism," so should the party of 2008 stand for the natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the threats posed by the cultures of death and immediate sexual gratification.

Straws in the wind from California

"Last night’s results give me encouragement that the next conservative resurgence is only one election away," writes Republican state assemblyman Chuck Devore from California, where I knew him as a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow. Devore's blog post on Wednesday morning highlighted the solid passage of Proposition 8, which annuls the recent state Supreme Court mandate for same-sex marriage; the likely passage of Proposition 11, which would set up competitive legislative districts in the Golden State after the next census for the first time in memory; the likely election to Congress of Tom McClintock, conservative hero who contested Schwarzenegger to the finish line in the 2003 recall election...

...and above all, the untenable contradiction between California voters' big margin for Obama, an apparent liberal affirmation, and the inherently conservative message sent by their approval of Prop 8.

Out there on the left coast, something clearly has to give.